Navigating Between Worlds

I recently finished Ken Burns’ masterful documentary series on the Civil War. It lived up to the reputation that it might be the finest documentary film ever produced. One of the prominent characters in the film is the Southern writer and Mississippi native Shelby Foote. Foote made this observation: “Southerners are strange about that war.” That strangeness grows out of the soil of how Southerners wrestle with the ghosts of the past. John A. Broadus knew firsthand the complexities and contradictions that marked Southern Baptists in the nineteenth century. William Whitsitt, his successor as president of SBTS, remarked at Broadus’s funeral that Broadus “kept his feet always firmly planted on Southern soil.” However, “he was as much loved in New York as Virginia.”^[1] Broadus accomplished something very few in his day ever could: he was a man revered in both the North and the South. This Baptist preacher and institutionalist transcended the South and possessed an international ministry. That Broadus achieved the preeminence he did as a Southern postbellum testifies to the remarkable qualities and character of the man.

As Eric C. Smith writes in his latest biography, Broadus was always a man navigating between worlds. For Broadus, he was faced with the challenges of remembering the Old South while pressing ahead to see the construction of a New South. He ministered and labored in Baptist churches in the South while pleading the seminary’s cause in the North to radically different audiences. Broadus was a complex figure. Smith describes Broadus as “an urbane gentleman with a commoner’s touch, a sophisticated scholar with a revivalist’s instinct, an unrepentant Confederate with a national appeal, and a man of the Old South with a modern vision for the New.”^[2] One could say that Broadus’s life was spent trying to thread a proverbial needle. His duties demanded him to be constantly aware of his audience and the context he was in. Now, some might say that meant he was a pragmatist shapeshifting to please the crowds. I would disagree. While one can find proper critiques of Broadus, it is endearing to me the way that he recognized diversity and differences among people. That did not deter him from preaching the truth.

One of the greatest examples of Broadus navigating between worlds was in 1890 when he spoke before an audience at John Hopkins University. Broadus was in the twilight of his career. By this point, he was a respected conservative scholar that Baptists and non-Baptists alike yearend to hear. He was chosen to deliver the first lecture of a new endowed series. Standing before many who were susceptible or embracing of higher criticism, Broadus delivered a passionate defense of orthodox Christology. There were those attempting to detach the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount away from the divine claims and exclusivity of Jesus Christ. Broadus passionately preached that “You deceive yourselves! For Jesus Christ stands before men not only as an ethical teacher, but also as Lord and Savior!”^[3] The lecture was later published as Jesus of Nazareth. In that moment, before the gentlemen of academia, Broadus returned to the core, basic truths that marked any ordinary Southern Baptist preacher. Broadus navigated between the worlds of scholarly respect and spiritual faithfulness. That type of navigation still confronts many of us today.

For me, Broadus became an unlikely role model. As a native of Mississippi with my family’s deep roots in rural Alabama, I am quite aware of the unique burden that comes to being a Southerner. While some might roll their eyes at such a statement, it is true that Southerners are strange about a great many things. It is our peculiar birthright. There is a sense in which one learns to appreciate the good of the past while confronting the specific burdens and flaws as well. Furthermore, as one who spends my life in the academy, I never want to lose sight of the normal people who fill the church pews each week. Recently, I was privileged to preach at a new church plant that is meeting in a hotel conference room. In that time there, I was reminded that what I do at the seminary is to equip me to minister to ordinary people who makeup Baptist churches. In what seems like another lifetime ago, I spent many Sundays preaching to just two people. Those two people happened to be my parents. My dad taught me to never forget where I came from. With all his accolades and accomplishments, Broadus never forgot he was a preacher charged with putting the emphasis on the King, not the herald. As all of us navigate between the earthly world and the heavenly world, may we be on guard to point people to the supremacy of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, each one of us is a beggar to God’s mercy alone.

^[1] Eric C. Smith, Between Worlds: John A. Broadus, The Southern Baptist Seminary, and the Prospects of the New South (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2026), 227.

^[2] Smith, Between Worlds, 6.

^[3] Smith, Between Worlds, 172.